Monthly Archives: October 2022

  • White Noise

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Noah Baumbach (2022)

    Don DeLillo’s 1985 post-modern novel White Noise is reputedly ‘unfilmable’.  Those of us who’ve not read it can’t know if Noah Baumbach’s screen version, showing at the London Film Festival, defies the book’s reputation – we can only decide if the result is a coherent piece of cinema, and it is.  But White Noise is also, alas, Baumbach’s least successful film since Margot at the Wedding (2007).

    In the opening sequence, an academic called Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) gives a lecture extolling the virtues of the car crash in American movies.  He tells his students – at the College-on-the-Hill, in a small town somewhere in the Midwest – that, whatever carnage may be involved, there’s something invigorating about Hollywood’s enduring appetite for upping the ante on the design and spectacular staging of automotive collision.  There’s a connection of sorts between Murray’s view and White Noise‘s central concern with the death-defying.  The lead characters are Murray’s College-on-the-Hill colleague Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), Professor of Hitler Studies, and his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig).  They’re both on their fourth marriage; the blended family runs to four children – Denise (Raffey Cassidy), Heinrich (Sam Nivola), Steffi (May Nivola) and Wilder (Dean Moore/Henry Moore), the youngest and the only child Jack and Babette have had together.  The household runs on a fuel of incessant, rapid-fire chatter, the precocious kids competing with their (step)father in the smart-aleck stakes, but it’s immediately clear these materially comfortable lives are lived on a neurotic precipice.  In bed Jack and Babette anxiously discuss which one of them had better die first.  Babette and Denise pronounce on the best medication for this or that; Denise asks Jack if he knows about the tablets that Babette is taking surreptitiously.  (He doesn’t.)  The kids are addicted to TV news coverage of disasters, natural or manmade.

    The family are soon themselves on the receiving end of catastrophe when, not too far from their home, a lorry crashes into a train transporting chemical waste.  A huge toxic cloud forces a mass exodus from the area.  Despite Jack’s increasingly hollow assurances that there’s nothing to worry about, he, Babette and the children have no option but to join their neighbours in a miles-long traffic jam, en route to an evacuation camp.  The protagonists’ morbid concerns aren’t the only feature of White Noise foreshadowed by that paean to car crashes.  The movie clips Murray Siskind uses to illustrate his lecture are a hint that Noah Baumbach will be stepping outside his comfort zone – his proven talent is for developing character through dialogue, typically in domestic settings – into set-piece action film-making.  Baumbach does a perfectly good job of staging the accident that causes the cataclysmic ‘Airborne Toxic Event’ and the sequences showing the Gladneys, and thousands of others, on the road.  When another motorist tries to queue-jump, there’s a sudden, unexpected car crash.  It’s hard to feel Murray’s relish for the ensuing wreckage but there’s no denying that Baumbach makes the moment startling.

    The panic flight from the toxic cloud is White Noise’s main event but proves to be a fuss about oddly little.  A few minutes out of the car at an unmanned petrol station are long enough for Jack to be exposed to airborne toxins; doctors tell him the consequences will be fatal though it may be decades before the poisons in his system finally do their work.  Once the film moves on in time, with the Gladneys back at home, the impact of the chemical spillage seems otherwise to have been negligible – and this doesn’t come across as Baumbach lampooning people who are wilfully oblivious to the dark side of life.  At the same time, the implication that lethal contamination forces Jack to confront the fact that he’s going to die feels surplus to dramatic requirements:  he and Babette were already preoccupied with their mortality.

    You get the same feeling when the narrative focus switches to Babette’s medication and the story behind it.  She’s taking an experimental drug called Dylar, designed to alleviate the fear of death.  Her supplier is a weirdo called Arlo Shell (Lars Eidinger), who lives in a motel room where Babette has sex with him in exchange for the tablets.  This strand may be meant to poke fun at contemporary society’s obsession with pharmacological cures for psychological ill health – it certainly picks up on all the talk in the Gladneys’ home about medical treatments.  But the idea of a pill to suppress fear of death (a pill that doesn’t work, for Babette anyway) seems a tautology in a scenario premised from the start on a theme of human beings ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’.  (That quotation, from a poem written in the mid-1930s, confirms the concept as far from new.)  One of the most effective moments in the toxic cloud hegira comes when the Gladneys notice a freeway-side department store still full of shoppers.  There’s a sale on, after all.

    Baumbach apparently retains Don DeLillo’s setting of the mid-1980s, a time when the US economy was riding high and climate change anxieties had yet to gather momentum.  The existential angst of DeLillo’s characters, despite their and America’s sitting pretty, may have meant more in 1985 than it can now – in light of disasters ranging from 9/11 to Covid and with the prospect of worse to come.  More damaging to the film is that the chattering-classes satire – in evidence at the Gladneys’ dinner table and especially in the College-on-the-Hill senior common room – imparts a sustained air of whimsy to proceedings that dilutes White Noise‘s menace and urgency.  Murray Siskind, fascinated by the iconography of American popular culture, wants to do for Elvis Presley what Jack has supposedly done for Hitler as an established academic subject.  (I wasn’t convinced that, even forty years ago, Jack was the academic pioneer he’s meant to be but let that pass.)  There’s a funny sequence in which Murray invites Jack to sit in on one of his lectures and it turns into a vigorous verbal competition between them, expatiating on the King vs the Führer.  Murray also likes to compare supermarket shopping with the Buddhist concept of bardo (the state of existence between two lives):  the closing credits of White Noise accompany a zany stop-go dance routine by Murray and the Gladneys along supermarket aisles.  But these elements, like the historical setting, undermine the film’s power as an apocalyptic black comedy.

    For much of the film, Adam Driver looks to have a cushion stuffed under his shirt.  When Jack takes off the shirt for a medical examination, the paunch is revealed as either real or high-class prosthetics.  Whichever it is seems a waste of effort as a means of underlining how middle-aged Jack is but perhaps Driver felt more secure with the extra weight.  His playing here is typically resourceful but unusually uneasy. He delivers, very ably, a series of turns – upstaging Murray’s lecture, struggling with the rudiments of spoken German (it turns out Jack, despite his academic cachet, has never learned the language but suddenly needs to, for a conference he’s hosting …)  Driver’s much less comfortable, though, with the abundant dialogue than he was in Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019) – perhaps because he intuits Jack isn’t much of a character.  Greta Gerwig, with her seemingly artless emotionality, comes off better than Driver.  Don Cheadle, a surprising choice for the role, does well as eccentric, fanciful Murray.  Lars Eidinger can be relied on to overact and duly does so:  the scenes involving Arlo Shell are so garish anyway this doesn’t matter as much as it might.  Among the Gladney kids, Sam and May Nivola are both notably fluent performers.  (Their father Alessandro is also in the cast, according to Wikipedia, though not according to IMDb – and I didn’t manage to spot him.)

    There’s no doubt White Noise is well named even though neither the characters’ non-stop talk nor the enduring soundtrack of broadcast media and muzak in the world they inhabit drowns out the insistent voice inside the heads of Jack and Babette that tells them they’re going to die.  At one point they wonder if ‘death is just sound – white noise’, whatever that may mean.  All in all, Noah Baumbach’s film, like Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2009), serves as a protracted reminder that witty screen talk about mortality was a lot more fun in Woody Allen’s heyday.

    7 October 2022

  • Leonora Addio

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paolo Taviani (2022)

    The film-making partnership of the Taviani brothers, Vittorio and Paolo, lasted more than half a century.  Their final collaboration as directors was Wonderful Boccaccio (2015); they shared the writing credit on A Private Matter (2017) but the failing health of Vittorio, the elder brother, meant that Paolo, for the first time, was named sole director.  Four years after his brother’s death, Paolo Taviani, now in his ninety-first year, has written and directed Leonora Addio.  He wasn’t well enough to travel to England for this screening at the London Film Festival but introduced it with a short video message.  He said the film had been described as ‘a bit experimental, a bit classical’, which he thought ‘the devil of a description’.  Taviani’s phrase is right enough:  Leonora Addio is absorbing but confounding.

    The film takes its title from a novel of the same name (‘Leonora, Farewell’) by Luigi Pirandello but it isn’t an adaptation of it, though Taviani is much concerned with the novel’s author.  In terms of screen time, Leonora Addio is mostly the story of what happened, following Pirandello’s death in 1936, to his ashes.  Appended to this is a dramatisation of his short story The Nail (Il chiodo).  For most of its ninety minutes, Leonora Addio comprises black and white film, including, as well as Taviani’s narrative, news footage of the Nobel ceremonies of 1934, where Pirandello received the prize for literature, and various archive glimpses of Italian life in the early post-war years.  There are just two bursts of colour – the golden flames of a cremation oven and the blue of the Mediterranean beyond the Sicilian coast.  The Nail, in contrast, is shot almost entirely in colour, which makes complete sense.

    Leonora Addio’s early sequences are narrated by the elderly Pirandello (voiced by Roberto Herlitzka).  His face remains unseen as we watch, from his point of view, his sons and daughter – first as young children then as the adults they were by 1936 – approach what’s about to be their father’s deathbed.  Pirandello had a long, sometimes turbulent relationship with Mussolini’s Fascist Party.  After publicly tearing up his Party membership card in 1927, he remained under secret police surveillance for the rest of his life but nevertheless donated his Nobel Prize medal to be melted as a contribution to Mussolini’s ‘Gold to the Fatherland’ campaign during the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935.  In Leonora Addio a Fascist government minister decrees that Pirandello, as a high-profile supporter of the Party, be given a state funeral, which was just what he didn’t want.  The film’s voiceover quotes from his detailed funeral instructions – the request that his body be transported to a crematorium on ‘a pauper’s cart’ and his ashes then dispersed ‘because I want nothing, not even ashes, to be left of me’.

    The cremation happened but the ashes wouldn’t go away.  Pirandello also stipulated that, if they were not immediately dispersed, the ashes should instead be returned to his home town, Agrigento in Sicily, and placed in ‘some rough, stone-walled countryside … where I was born’.  That’s what eventually happened – but not until 1961.  The ashes remained for a decade in a niche within Rome’s Verano Cemetery before the first post-war Italian administration allowed them to be taken to Palermo for a second funeral and interment according to Pirandello’s second-preference wishes.  The sculptor commissioned to construct the urn’s final resting place, on a hillside outside Agrigento, devoted the best part of fifteen years to the project.  The delay, in other words, was comically lengthy and Taviani, in describing the ashes’ journey from Rome under the supervision of a Sicilian local government official (Fabrizio Ferracane) and their protracted stopover in Palermo, repeatedly tries to show the funny side of the matter.

    As the aircraft carrying the ashes from Rome to Palermo waits to take off, a rumour starts up that there’s a dead man on the plane.  The superstitious passengers anxiously disembark, leaving only the pilot, the government official and the urn on board.  For the second funeral procession that moves down the streets of Palermo, the urn is lodged in a smaller-than-usual coffin:  a watching child asks his mother if there’s a dwarf inside it.  The mother can’t help laughing and whispers their son’s question to her solemn-looking husband.  He also cracks up – ditto the next person who hears about what the boy said.  This pass-it-on sequence is a rather tiresome means of showing off a succession of amazing camera faces and stressing the irresistible (or that’s the idea) Italian sense of humour.  More effective is the eventual transfer of the ashes from one urn to another, before the final interment, in a Palermo council office.  The second urn is too small to accommodate all the ashes, some of which spill onto the paper covering a desk.  After the officials doing the transfer have left the room with the new urn, another man enters and gathers up the residue from the paper on the desk. After the urn has been deposited in its hillside niche, the same man reappears to disperse the remainder of the ashes into the air, as Pirandello wanted in the first place.

    After this comes The Nail.  Bastianeddu (Matteo Pittiruti), twelve or so years old, is a recent immigrant to America from Sicily, with other members of his family.  They’ve made their home in New York and Bastianeddu helps out in the bar in Harlem run by one of his relatives.  Charming when he waits tables and does a little dance number for the customers, the boy has a less likeable habit of getting dogs to walk on their front legs while he keeps hold of the hind legs.  Bastianeddu does this in Sicily (in a flashback shot in black and white) and again in New York, when he comes upon a dog as he’s leaving work one day.  Nearby, on a patch of waste ground, two girls are fighting violently.  One girl (Dora Becker), whose hair is black and dress dark blue, is older than the other; her opponent (Dania Marino), in a red dress and with startlingly vivid orange hair, is more feral.  Her name is Betty.  Bastianeddu sees a large nail on the ground.  He picks up the nail and drives it into Betty’s head, killing her instantly.

    Even though the monochrome images of the ashes odyssey are beautifully composed and lit (by Paolo Carnera and Simone Zampagni), they tend to be upstaged by Taviani’s remarkable collection of news film.  And Leonora Addio‘s prevailing wintry atmosphere, reinforced by Nicola Piovani’s elegant, elegiac score, is vividly contradicted by the vehemently sinister New York sequences, with their portraits of brutal children.  The register eventually reverts, though.  Bastianeddu at first tells the police he believes he was meant to spot the nail on the ground precisely in order to do what he did to Betty.  After seeing her corpse in the police morgue, he starts to think again.  His voiceover promises his victim that he’ll never forget her, and he’s as good as his word:  we see the adult Bastianeddu visiting Betty’s grave.  I may have misremembered but I think of this sequence too as in black and white – because it’s tonally more in keeping with the earlier parts of the film.

    Otherwise, The Nail simply couldn’t have been enclosed within Taviani’s main narrative without overwhelming it.  Pirandello wrote Il chiodo only just before his death yet the tale shockingly interrupts the persistent impression Leonora Addio gives of being an old man’s film.  Perhaps, though, it also confirms that impression.  Paolo Taviani evidently wanted to dramatise Pirandello’s short story as well as the long story of his ashes.  Although it’s an awkward fit with what’s gone before, the nonagenarian Taviani has good reason to tack The Nail onto Leonora Addio rather than await another opportunity to bring it to the screen.

    6 October 2022

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